I’ve published (or will soon have published) six pieces over the last year of full-time writing, but the lyric essay – “A Nature Lover’s Phobia” – posted online in Fringe Magazine: The Environment Issue yesterday makes me particularly happy.
I have wanted to be a nature writer since childhood. I thought becoming a zoologist would lead me there. But I didn’t become a zoologist. I took a thirty year detour through cultural anthropology, Marxist and feminist theory, single parenting, non-profit administration, and teaching high school social studies. Working on my book on Nepal, I still think of myself as an ethnographer – a chronicler of culture, not nature.
Of course, I often try to show the complicated threads that shape human experience of our physical nature, cultivated nature, and wildness. But publishing a piece viewed as a literary perspective on the environment allows me to indulge some childhood fantasies and also see my way towards a future of more nature writing (although it will probably always have a cultural twist; that’s the anthropologist in me).
The boot featured in “A Nature Lover’s Phobia.“
The Environment Issue of Fringe Magazine includes provocative writing by S. Asher Sund, Rick Andrews, Joseph Scapellato, Amy Letter, Molly Gaudry and photographs by Diane Parisella-Katris. I was especially moved by Lizzie Stark’s audio interview with Kelly McMasters about Welcome to Shirley - her memoir of growing up near a Long Island nuclear plant.
If you’re interested in more of my “nature’ writing, you can read “Looking for Black Gibbons” online and get yourself a print copy of the Spring 2009 volume of the Gettysburg Review with my essay on natural childbirth in Nepal.
